expression of Sim and a tribute to the creativity of quilting.
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I liked the style, the sentences are short, precise, with just enough humor. In fact it was very pleasant to read.
The chapters are just long enough and the flashbacks permitted the reader to set the situation of a sailor's life and the choices you have to make. BUT I would like to have followed with small charts at the beginning of each chapter (what my own editor has asked me to do) with points where you were and where you go. Sailors like to see this.
However, I appreciated very much all the photographs, very well situated. I like very much too the "introspectives" and would have liked even more of them. I enjoyed too the poetry, it rings so "true" and I felt that very much. Even in drama I was aware of Shirley's "joie to vivre".
Finally you hae given me a taste and I wish to read more of your adventures because this book merits it. Ihope to read the next book soon.
Dr. Marie-Andre Champagne MD. physician and writer (3 books published) of Sailboat 'Andante ma non troppo' - sailed from Montreal to Turkey during 10 years. crossing ATlantic in '95.
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I have just finished reading your wonderful book. I couldn't put it down. It was sensitively written in a easy to read style. You captured the psychology of women in relationships with husbands and other women and fit it to the culture and attitudes of everyday life in the 1800's.
The fact that it is a biography of uour great grandmother and carefully researched has made it valuable historically.
I can't think of a book I've enjoyed reading more. You should be on the Oprah Winfrey show to let other people know now good this book is. Congratulations on your achievement.
realize their aspirations, despite her firsthand knowledge of their abilities? Why, moreover, might she express the rigid perspective that her daughters could interpret as their true inheritance; the belief that flawed judgment is a universally female characteristic?
Shirley Allen's biographical novel, based on the life of her great grandmother Roxanna Britton, provides the historical context to, if not answer, at least ask such questions. In a social and political climate that does not allow women to vote, to have money, property or identity outside of marriage, we experience the consequences for one exceptionally gifted, resilient daughter who has the good fortune to find male partners who see beyond the gender role assumptions of the time. Roxanna realizes and develops abilities including teaching, farming, homemaking, motherhood, single parenting, dressmaking, enterpeneurship, homesteading and property ownership. Whether selling eggs to establishing financial independence or designing dresses for a shopkeeper's marketing, Roxanna is freshly creative, adapting herself to utilize and maximize the circumstances of the moment.
Married at nineteen, widowed and at age twenty two, mother of two baby girls,
she moves from her own home in Cleveland to her parents home in Avon. Due to hardship, the extended family then moves to Brimfield, Indiana to join Roxanna's maternal grandparents. There she witnesses the critical tongue of her grandmother towards her mother. This multi generational pattern of nonsupportive female
relationships is captured by Allen via the three generation household, clearly a reflection of the broader cultural attitude toward women. Although this is sufficiently convincing proof of the lack of status of women, Roxanna must reside with her new husband, Amos, in his parent's home, where her mother-in-law competes to retain her
role as Amos's primary resource.
Finally, in 1865, a move to Chicago brings a change of status for Roxanna; she may and does purchase her own property. But Chicago brings other difficulties; oldest daughter Sylvia has left home, only to be found one year later, eight months pregnant, murdered by her husband. Chicago 's great fire is depicted vividly, the dangers of city life, the harshness of a mushrooming commercialism without laborer restrictions is made specific. In Chicago, Roxanna meets her first husband's sister, Lizzie. An active suffragette, it is Lizzie who begins to stir Roxanna's awareness of the political and social disparity between men and women.
Roxanna moves once again with her family, this time to Nebraska for homesteading. Daughter Martha has married an abusive, alcoholic husband who uses her for target practice. It is Roxanna's ingenuity and adaptation that confronts the injustice.
Paralleling the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves, women's plight is poignantly illustrated. Death of children is a common occurrence. The exorbitant work day hours devoted to manual labor and child care precludes us from consulting
women writers of the time. However, through this reconstruction of Allen's foremothers, coupled with a rapidly industrializing America, we are permitted a glimpse of the grace and courage of our founding mothers.
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Fantastic! 2 thumbs up!
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The steam railroads began to take hold of the U.S. travel market in the 1930s, when people called them Iron Horses. The first three-page chapter describes the process by which trains replaced the horse and stagecoach and began to haul laws, raw materials and farm produce across the U.S. The railroads employed engineers, conductors, brakemen, firemen, station agents, dispatchers and many others to keep them running, not to mention the legions who worked to build thousands of miles of track.
Most were men, but beginning in 1838, a handful of Native American and black women (the latter, freed slaves) began to work in domestic service jobs for the railroads. They also served water and sold fruit to women traveling in the ladies' cars. In 1855, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad hired Bridget Doheny, Catherine Shirley and Susan Morningstar as charwomen to clean the Camden, N.J. depot. In 1870, the Hartford & New Haven line hired a Mrs. T. Hatch to care for the Newington station for 75 cents a day.
In the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, women began working as telegraphers, known in the business as brass pounders. Women like Ella Campbell communicated by Morse code with brass telegraph keys, determining which trains had rights of way, often preventing accidents. Boiler explosions, blizzards, coupling cars and runaway trains caused accidents and deaths. But hundreds more would have occurred annually without the women who worked in train traffic control. Women also served as ticket sellers and train dispatchers. By 1900 they worked as clerks.
Sarah Clark Kidder became the first woman president of a railroad in 1900 and Mary Pennington designed an improved refrigeration car and worked several years to convince railroad executives to use them. Mary Colter was an architect, who designed the Harvey chain of restaurants for the length of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa & Fe. Still others manned the chain as Harvey's girls.
But the largest influx of women into the railroad workforces occurred during the two World Wars. With men recruited to fight in Europe, the U.S. labor market turned to women to fill their jobs. Thousands of women flooded key railroad jobs--as towermen, yardmasters, drawbridge tenders, steam-hammer and turntable operators, welders, brakemen, freight handlers--and riveters.
During World War I, women worked a 48-hour week for as much as $95 a month, although they were often paid something less as "helpers." But they experienced strong patriotism and pride in their work, laboring both in their work and against discrimination and harassment, which was particularly strong against women of color. Finally there were so many women in the railroading industry that the U.S. Railroad Administration created a Women's Service Section to promote safe, comfortable working conditions for them. But when the men returned from war in late 1918, women were laid off in droves for "using bad language," "drunkeness," and "distracting men at work."
The pattern repeated in World War II. Once again the women made the U.S. victory trains run.
The last chapter of this fine read discusses the past, the present and the future for American railroading women. Alyssa A. Lappen
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